Chapter 73

The Confederate Government Organized--Fort Sumter--President Lincoln Calls for 75000 Men--Command of the Union Forces offered to Robert E. Lee--Lee Joins the Confederacy--Missouri Saved to the Union--Battle of Bull Run--Union Successes in the West--General Grant Captures Fort Donelson--"I Have No Terms but Unconditional Surrender"--The Monitor and Merrimac Fight--Its World-Wide Effect--Grant Victorious at Shiloh--Union Naval Victory Near Memphis--That City Captured--General McClellan's Tactics--He Retreats from Victory at Malvern Hill--Second Bull Run Defeat--Great Battle of Antietam--Lee Repulsed, but Not Pursued-- McClellan Superseded by Burnside--Union Defeat at Frederickburg-- Union Victories in the West--Bragg Defeated by Rosecrans at Stone River --The Emancipation Proclamation.

The new Confederate Government was organized at Montgomery, Ala., February 4, 1861, by delegates from South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, was elected President and Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, Vice-President. The border States, which would be the battlefield of war, still hoped for peace, and hesitated to yield to the importunities of those who had already crossed the Rubicon. In Charleston harbor, the American flag floated over a little fortress called Sumter, so named after the "South Carolina Gamecock" of the Revolution, and commanded by Major Robert Anderson. In the gray of the morning on April 12, the Confederate batteries opened fire on the fort. For nearly two days the Stars and Stripes waved defiantly amid the storm of shot and shell. Then further resistance being useless and hopeless, the brave garrison evacuated the fort, carrying away the flag which they had so resolutely defended. Two days later President Lincoln called for 75,000 men to put down armed resistance to national authority. The North sprang to arms, and from East and West regiments started on their way to Washington. The governors of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia and Missouri declined to obey the call of the President, and the secession of all these States from the Union followed, except Kentucky and Missouri. On April 17, the Virginia Convention passed the Ordinance of Secession. President Lincoln had desired to give the command of the troops to be called into the field to Colonel Robert E. Lee, of the First United States Cavalry, but that officer declined to accept the offer, resigned his commission, and joined the Confederacy. It should be needless to say that the qualities displayed by Lee, at the head of the Army of Northern Virginia, amply justified President Lincoln's measure of his capacity. The seat of the Confederate Government was removed from Montgomery to Richmond, and the latter city was thenceforward the headquarters of the rebellion.

Of the other border States Maryland remained in the Union, and Kentucky, after an attempt to maintain an impossible neutrality, yielded to the influence of mountain air, and espoused the cause of freedom. Missouri's disloyal government sought to drag the State into secession, but Francis Preston Blair, a lawyer of St. Louis, and Captain Nathaniel Lyon, commandant of the United States Arsenal in that city, took vigorous action against the rebel sympathizers, and saved the State to the Union. The German element in Missouri was so loyal to the old flag that "Unionist" and "Dutchman" were synonymous terms in that region during the war. Captain Lyon, promoted to brigadier-general, was defeated and killed at the battle of Wilson Creek. It is believed that he resolved to win the battle or die. Of such stuff were the men who rescued the Southwest.

The battle of Bull Run, when General Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the Confederates, defeated General McDowell with serious loss, and sent the Union army in disorderly retreat toward Washington, taught the Northern people that the war was not a parade, and that the overthrow of the Confederacy would tax all the energies of the loyal States. Fortunately, General George H. Thomas won an important victory for the Union at Mill Spring, Kentucky, in January, 1862, and the capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, in the following month, by General Ulysses S. Grant, aided by Commodore Foote and his gunboats, tended to efface the depression caused by defeat in Virginia. General Grant's reply to the Confederate General Buckner, when the latter wished to make terms for the surrender of Fort Donelson, was on every tongue in the North. "I have no terms but unconditional surrender. I propose to move immediately upon your works," was a message that spoke the man. Nearly sixteen thousand prisoners were captured. They belonged mostly to the working classes of Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas.

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John Ericsson's Monitor, in March, 1862, sent a thrill of relief and joy through the North by its wonderful victory over the Merrimac. The Confederates cut down a United States frigate at the Norfolk navy yard, and transformed it into an ironclad ram, with a powerful beak. This monster they sent against the Union fleet of wooden warships in Hampton Roads. Broadsides had no effect on the Merrimac. The floating fortress attacked the Cumberland, ramming that vessel, and breaking a great hole in its side. The Cumberland sank with all on board. The Congress was driven aground and compelled to surrender. Then the monster rested for the night, intending to continue its mission of destruction on the morrow. It seemed that not only the Union fleet, but the ports and commerce of the North would be at the mercy of this novel and terrible engine of destruction. The telegraph carried the news everywhere, and in dread and anxiety the people awaited the fate of another day. When morning came at Hampton Roads a small nondescript vessel, looking like an oval raft with a turret, interposed between the Merrimac and its prey. It was the Monitor, the invention of Captain John Ericsson, and it had arrived during the night of March 8. The Monitor had been constructed at Greenpoint, Long Island, and was towed to Hampton Roads by steamers. Her turret was a revolving, bomb-proof fort, in which were mounted two 11-inch Dahlgren guns. As the turret revolved the great guns kept up a steady discharge, battering the sides of the Merrimac. The latter hurled enormous masses of iron on the Monitor, but made no impression whatever on the little craft, and the duel continued until the Merrimac gave up the fight, and ran back to shelter at Norfolk. Ericsson's praise was on every tongue. The great Swedish engineer whose sanity had been questioned when he submitted his ideas to the Navy Department, not only saved the Union navy from destruction, and Northern harbors from devastation, but he also revolutionized naval warfare.

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Their first line broken in the Southwest, and now compelled to fight within secession territory, the Confederates made a stand along a second line from Memphis to Chattanooga, their forces being massed at Corinth. In the great battle of Shiloh (April 6 and 7) 100,000 men were engaged; the National loss in killed, wounded and prisoners was about 15,000, and that of the Confederates over 10,000. The latter fought more desperately than on any previous field, and for a time they had the advantage. The usual ethics of defeat had, however, no place in General Grant's military education, and the enemy were at length forced to give way. General Albert Sydney Johnston, one of the ablest Confederate commanders, was killed, and General Beauregard retreated, leaving his dead and wounded in Union hands. The second line of defence was broken. An amusing incident of this battle--if anything can be amusing in war--was a message sent by General Beauregard to General Grant explaining why he had withdrawn his troops. General Grant was strongly tempted to assure Beauregard that no apologies were necessary.

The capture of New Orleans in the latter part of April, and of Island Number Ten in the same month gave the National forces control of the Mississippi nearly up to Vicksburg and down to Memphis. The Confederate flotilla was defeated and destroyed in a sharp engagement by the Union river fleet, two miles above Memphis, on June 6, the battle occurring in full view of that city. It was one of the most dramatic spectacles of the war. The combat lasted just one hour and three minutes, and as the Union fleet landed at Memphis, a number of newsboys sprang on shore from the vessels, shouting: "Here's your New York _Tribune_ and _Herald_!"--before the city had been formally surrendered. The Unionists received the National troops like brothers, and one lady brought out from its hiding place in her chimney a National flag concealed from the beginning of the war. "We found Memphis," wrote a correspondent, "as torpid as Syria, where Yusef Browne declared that he saw only one man exhibit any sign of activity, and he was engaged in tumbling from the roof of a house." Salt was rubbed into the wounds of the vanquished by the military assignment of Albert D. Richardson and Col. Thomas W. Knox, representatives of the _Tribune_ and _Herald_, to edit the bitterest secession newspaper in the town.

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In the East the Union cause made no progress. General George B. McClellan, in command of the Army of the Potomac, was endeavoring to play the part of a Turenne in a field utterly foreign to European strategy. Generals Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston and Thomas Jonathan ("Stonewall") Jackson, the three great Confederate commanders in Virginia, proved themselves easily the superiors of their antagonists in the tactics best fitted for American warfare, and but for the stubborn valor of the Union soldiers at Fair Oaks and in the seven days' battles ending at Malvern Hills, the Army of the Potomac would probably have been destroyed. When Malvern Hills was won by the splendid fighting of the National troops, without any agency of their commander, and when they were enthusiastic for a forward movement upon Richmond, McClellan consulted his tactical horoscope, and ordered them to retreat just as if they had been beaten. The second battle of Bull Run, with General John Pope in command on the Union side, and Generals Lee, "Stonewall" Jackson and James Longstreet leading the Confederates, stopped short of being as disastrous a defeat for the National arms as the first Bull Run, but that was all.

Lee pushed into Maryland with about 45,000 troops, and encountered McClellan at Antietam, on September 17, with 85,000. McClellan was "cautious," as usual, but fighting had to be done, and the rank and file of the Union forces were, as ever, anxious to fight. Lee was repulsed after a fearful conflict, in which about 20,000 men were killed and wounded. General Joseph Hooker, known as "Fighting Joe Hooker," was under McClellan at Antietam, and behaved most gallantly. Wounded before noon, Hooker was carried from the field. "Had he not been disabled," wrote a war correspondent, "he would probably have made it a decisive conflict. Realizing that it was one of the world's great days, he said: 'I would gladly have compromised with the enemy by receiving a mortal wound at night, could I have remained at the head of my troops until the sun went down.'" McClellan neglected to take advantage of the success achieved at the cost of so many brave lives, and Mr. George W. Smalley, then of the _Tribune_, who was on the field, is authority for the statement that General Hooker was privately requested in behalf of a number of Union officers, to assume command and follow up the victory. In Hooker's condition this was impossible, even had he been inclined to take a step so serious in its possible consequences for himself.

McClellan was superseded in November by General Ambrose E. Burnside, who had distinguished himself at Antietam, as he always did in a subordinate command. On December 13, General Burnside suffered a fearful defeat at Fredericksburg, with a loss of 12,000 men. It was one of Lee's most brilliant victories, and on the Union side it was a useless sacrifice of life. "Lee's position," says General Fitzhugh Lee, "was strong by nature and was made stronger by art. No troops could successfully assail it, and no commanding general should have ordered it to be done."[1] Burnside was superseded by Hooker, and the armies in Virginia did but little more until spring.

[1] Life of General Robert E. Lee. D. Appleton & Co.

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After the battle of Shiloh the Confederates made Chattanooga, Tenn., the base of their operations in the Southwest. General Braxton Bragg, who succeeded Beauregard in command in that region, invaded Kentucky, and sought to drive the inhabitants into the Confederate service. A sanguinary battle at Perryville resulted in the complete repulse of the Confederates, who retreated into Tennessee, carrying with them a vast quantity of plunder. General William Starke Rosecrans now came to the front as a successful Union commander. With Grant's left wing he defeated the Confederates at Iuka, September 19, and Corinth, October 3 and 4, and as chief of the Army of the Cumberland, he fought one of the great battles of the war with General Bragg at Murfreesboro, or Stone River, December 31 and January 2. Never during the four years of conflict did the troops on both sides fight more resolutely. The first day was rather favorable to the Confederates. Little was done on New Year's Day, but on January 2 the struggle was renewed more fiercely than before. The western armies had caught Grant's instinct of never recognizing defeat. Charge after charge was made, first by the Confederates, then by the Union troops, and at length the Confederate line fell back, and did not charge again. At midnight of January 4 Bragg retired in the direction of Chattanooga. The killed, wounded and missing numbered over 20,000, probably about evenly divided.

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The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Lincoln on New Year's Day, 1863, was in every sense a statesmanlike and justifiable measure. It aroused the powerful anti-slavery sentiment of England in support of the Union, and neutralized Tory sympathy with the Confederacy; it strengthened the Union cause at home, and it showed that the National Government was not afraid to punish, and was resolved to weaken its enemies by the confiscation of their property.